Curated by
April 13, 2023
-
May 16, 2023
Nicki Cherry
Opening Reception: Friday, April 14th, 6-8pm
NARS Project Space
The doctrine of signatures is the theory that plants hold medical properties to heal that which they bear resemblance. Brain-like walnuts cure headaches; plants that look like scorpions are an anecdote to the arachnid’s sting. Signatures are a mark that breaks the surface to reveal its holder’s hidden interior.
The boundary between interior and exterior is similarly dissolved within the works presented in this exhibition. Traversing the gallery, visitors encounter fragmented, figural sculptures made of concrete, fiberglass, and ceramic. The artist has planted live tulips in soil-filled hollows in each body. These tulips will cycle through their lifespan throughout the duration of the exhibition—sprouting, blooming, and eventually wilting.
About the artist:
Nicki Cherry is an artist based in New York and Chicago. After initially studying to become a particle physicist, Cherry received their BA from the University of Chicago in 2014 and their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019. Their work has been exhibited at GHOSTMACHINE, the Border Project Space, Flux Factory, ELM Foundation and Shin Gallery in New York; AUTOMAT and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; the Reva David Logan Center for the Arts and Slate Arts and Performance in Chicago. They have received grants from Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. They have completed residencies at Surf Point Foundation in Maine, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and NARS Foundation in Brooklyn. Cherry was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Arts.
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Support for this exhibition is generously provided by:
Cherry’s work frequently incorporates tulips in reference to the late 15th century Hieronymus Bosch painting Cutting the Stone, which depicts a doctor surgically removing a tulip sprout from a patient’s head. In Medieval Dutch folklore, mental illness was believed to be caused by a stone growing in the inflicted’s skull. Twin ceramic animals perched on the gallery floor refer both to these stones of insanity as well as Bosch’s transformation of mineral into living plant matter. Tulips grow in the pendulous bulges of one of the creatures; the other holds ocean-polished rocks.
Sheer silk hung from a medical curtain track bisects the gallery. Cherry created the fabric’s saturated print by collaging cropped photos of their post-adolescent acne infections. If hospitals are places in which the boundary between interior and exterior of the body is continually broken, then medical curtains are an attempt to repair that boundary by shielding visitors from a site that forces reckoning with their own corporeality. The sheerness of the curtains hung here denies such a tidy compartmentalization.
In conjunction with Doctrine of Signatures, Cherry will give an artist talk on May 17 alongside an exhibition publication launch.
Support for this exhibition was generously provided by Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC and Surf Point Foundation. NARS exhibition programs are also made possible in part through the generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor.
